Month: May 2018

• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from Affinity Magazine with the reasoning of modern conservatives, which is to say Trump supporters, who find it reasonable to reject reason.
   
• Melissa Saunders at Anything Political gives a Weekly Reader recap of Trump agonistes and examines whether Rudy Giuliani has gotten President Trump into a deeper hot mess.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen has a flair for words, describing the clash of witless comedy versus the steely eyed Mueller juggernaut, as Giuliani meets the Trump narrative. Kind of like Ma and Pa Kettle picking a fight with Julius Caesar’s Roman army.
   
• We’re making America great again. Depending on how you define it, I suppose. Infidel753 looks at his checklist and isn’t sure how much more greatest the country can take.
   
• T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, provides a combination of
  • conservative fact list – Conservative British PM says parents should have no right to continue treatment on their own for a child determined by experts to be clinically dead (what the hell)
  • conservative hope list – Trump coordinated peace in Korea (we all hope)
  • conservative wish list – Iran proven to have violated nuclear deal (not true)

  in a sort of confluence of conservative epistemic closure. See Julian Sanchez.
   

• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post reviews the history of war and peace and and Korea and Trump.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass reports the hopeful news as students organize to meet with political leaders to talk about possible solutions to gun violence. One possible hitch. Most political leaders decline to show up.
   
• @bjork55 at Bjork Report has the picture. A sixth grader photobombs the selfie of a Florida politician with an unexpected gesture.
   
• At Web of Evil, it’s kind of like something from Eddie Poe (Okay – that’s flippant). The thousand injuries of Zuckerberg M. Bouffant has borne as best he could. But when Facebook ventures upon insult, by taking over baseball, he vows revenge.
   
• Vagabond Scholar does not mention Trump and company at all, as he quotes a minor poem by the great Robert Frost in a sort of primordeal Hobson’s choice.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study by three universities who did MRIs on crocodiles as they listened to Bach.
   

 
From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Is the right to vote a fundamental inalienable right or a derivative civil right? The answer to that question will largely determine the future of Americanism.

The right to vote is important. But there is a stark difference between the Progressives’ concept of the vote and the vote in a free society. In a free society—that is, in the original American concept of republican government—the voting majority’s will as expressed by the government officials it elects (and their appointees) is limited by iron-clad constitutional protection of individual rights.

For Progressives (or “liberals” or Leftists), the voting majority’s will is not limited in such a way. In a free society, individual rights trump the vote: that is, the losing minority in an election have nothing to fear from the politicians elected by the other side, because the politicians have no power to legislate or regulate away the losing side’s (or anyone’s) individual rights, thanks to “iron-clad constitutional protection of individual rights.”

– More –
 

 
From Green Eagle:

How many of these incidents, in which the President of the United States deliberately sabotages the security interests of the United States in order to benefit Russia, are going to have to happen before more than a few people will admit in public that he is a traitor? We have had a constant series of actions like this, since right after he was elected and he tried to do away with sanctions on Russia, but the masses of people that claimed to see something evil in inexplicable complaints about Hillary’ e-mails or Benghazi, refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of their faces. Putin put him in office, and he is paying him back. That’s the reality today, but the vast majority of Americans, including virtually the entire mainstream press, won’t admit what is completely obvious.

– More –
 

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

The candidates, however, kept things mostly cordial, at least until closing statements. Then, the gloves kind of came off.

“My track record, I would look to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, if you want it. That’s where I’d look first,” Nicholson said. “I know that doesn’t mean that much to certain politicians.”

A chorus of boos rose from some in the crowd at the Country Springs Hotel and Waterpark conference room. It was more than an intimation to the state senator’s supporters that Nicholson was talking about Vukmir.

“That was a very, very low blow to say that I don’t respect your service,” Vukmir shot back. “I respect your service and I am grateful for your service. I would ask you apologize.”

“If it makes you feel better, I feel respected,” Nicholson retorted.

– More –
 

 
From Andy Borowitz:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The special counsel, Robert Mueller, is actively considering what would be the most appropriate thank-you gift to send to the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a source close to Mueller’s team has confirmed.

According to the source, Mueller and his team were behind closed doors on Thursday morning to discuss the gift and appear to be close to a decision.

“They’ve been around and around on this, but a consensus seems to be forming on a bottle of single-malt Scotch,” the source said.

– More –
 

 
From driftglass:

You may know Mr. Michael Gerson as George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter and senior Republican policy adviser who put the lie of “a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” into Dubya’s mouth. Or you may know Mr. Gerson as yet another Bush Regime Dead Ender who was bequeathed a wingnut welfare media sinecure for life after the Bush Administration collapsed around his ears. Or you may know Mr. Gerson as America’s emergency backup David Brooks — a reliable Beltway Republican stalactite who has spilled countless barrels of ink insisting that there exists some other, perfectly rational and humane Republican Party out there somewhere which he can clearly see, and which you can see too if you just stare directly into the sun long enough.

But however you have come to know Mr. Gerson, you know him to be a fop and a fraud who, at long last, has but one rusty tin drum remaining in his orchestra of bullshit.

That always-reliable Both Sides Do It drum.

And my oh my doesn’t he pound it as if his life depended on it.

– More –
 

 
From Max’s Dad:

You cannot possibly keep up with this shit. This nation’s descent into irrelevance continues. WE are becoming that asshole neighbor who has no brains, no couth yet has 400 guns and yells a lot at anyone who comes near his lawn. Yeah everybody knows it isnt going to end well for this cretin, but he’s so out of his mind, and he’s armed, so you just go out of your way to avoid him. God Bless America! Please, soon.

1) Mike Pompeo is a bigoted Kansas nitwit. The man makes a disastrous Secretary of State like Rex Tillerson look like Jefferson. Yet the Senate, including a bunch of Democrats, still stuck in the belief that a Trump voter would actually vote for them if they just voted for enough brain dead bigots to satisfy their stupid, approved this balloon headed shithead to represent American values abroad. Ya know, bigotry, homophobia, anti-Islam beliefs, all those American values. Pompeo will take his Jesus based bullshit abroad to turn the State Department even more irrelevant, which may be the mission in the first place. Diplomacy is a lost art, just bomb the fuck out of anyone who gets in your way and say America Fuck Yeah! The only problem with this idiotic belief is eventually the whole world hates your guts. That’s when the road to bring down the Block Bully becomes easier. We need friends.

2) Joy Ann Reid is a national treasure. She may or may not have made tweets offensive to the LBBTQ community in her distant past. Obviously that was not cool. Joy Reid apologized for that today. So lets not eat our own again because of imperfection. Joy Reid is a lot like a lot of people. What she believed as someone who didnt know the people she looked down upon became old news. When she found out that the people she looked down on were all around her the views changed. This is called learning and progressing. Its called changing your mind. Changing your mind is strength, not weakness. Some day perhaps Trumpers can try it. Perhaps neanderthals like Mike Pompeo can try it.

– More –
 

 
From Glenn Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

“. . . and forgetting long-passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not upon their ashes.”

-Thomas Browne-

Stephen Foster’s songs and ballads earned for him an honored place in the music of the United States,” or so says the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that must have been written some time ago before America got “woke” as they say in le nouveau dialecte. His name is now mud because of course, according to our new standards, he’s a racist, as of course am I, as a secular humanist of European extraction. His statue in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly but ephemeral and conditional love, is now being removed from public view.

Having died in 1864 with the war still on and the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation still wet, he spoke the English of the time. He grew up in the United States that included slave states and he spoke the same American English that every other American spoke and that included words we don’t use today out of respect for those enslaved people. I’m pretty sure Washington and Jefferson, as well as the Abolitionists, didn’t balk at common usage of the time.

– More –
 

 
From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

And what noble cause and lofty principles inspired this bestial, bloodthirsty cruelty? Why were Dangerfield Newby’s ears cut off as trophies after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, as were the ears, nose, and genitals of Sam Hose during his torture and dismemberment in 1899? Why did Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest butcher hundreds of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864 and white militiamen slaughter 100 African-Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, who were merely trying to safeguard the results of the local elections there in 1873? As Jane Coaston recently explained (“Confederate Memorial Day: when multiple states celebrate treason in defense of slavery”), Alabama Confederates like Stephen F. Hale made no secret of the obvious in December 1860:

What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed?

– More –
 

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Trump has overseen a drop in America’s standing as a safe place for a free press. And his Justice Department has gone so far as to remove a section on the “need for a free press” from its manual.

On Sunday, BuzzFeed reported that it has been tracking changes to the DOJ’s “US Attorneys’ Manual,” after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ordered a review of the document. BuzzFeed noted the removal of an entire subsection entitled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial.”

Prior to its removal, that section said that “careful weight must be given in each case to the constitutional requirements of a free press and public trials as well as the right of the people in a constitutional democracy to have access to information about the conduct of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and courts, consistent with the individual rights of the accused.”

– More –